Lyberta wrote:
There are many ways to pull people into slavery while looking cool. Look at the Open Source community (yes, I'm talking Eric S Raymond, Linus Torvalds, Google, etc.). The fact that you chose CC0 and not something copyleft shows that you're OK with your work being used in proprietary things. Better than pure proprietary but still.
You always had a choice. Whatever you do, you always has a choice. When the project grows, you need to understand the consequences. Succumbing to capitalism is a very easy mistake to make and that is why free software and free cultural works movement is focused from trying to teach people not to make this mistake. I don't care how much money or time I put into my work, I will never put a proprietary license on it or consider the "recoup" cost. Recoup what? If my software helped people then I did a good thing and this is my recoup. I survive on 250$/mo and if I ever get more money, I will build a better PC and then keep putting everything else into free software or free cultural works. Money has no value to me once my basic survival needs are fulfilled.
That's good for you, friend, you are very lucky to live in such a cheap place. I cannot live on such a fantastically low amount as $250/mo., as that is physically impossible where I live if I wish to remain healthy. To live on $250/mo. here, I would need to literally be a bum on the street (absolute cheapest rent here is at least $500/mo. for a dilapidated closet, not including utilities of course!) and eat fast food once, perhaps twice a day (pretty much already do that, so...). I would need to surrender all my opportunities to learn from others, to visit museums, to see the world, to journey freely and without confines. I would be a prisoner of my own philosophy, my only crime being to believe that not participating in the world has the power to change it. While you suggest that I have a choice regardless of what I do, if I wish to remain alive, I do not
always have a choice.
One of the unfortunate side effects of both living near a city (it's funny how all the talented musicians I wish to sample to make decent sample libraries also live in cities, isn't it?) and living in a capitalist society is learning when to play the game and when to stick to your principles, because there are plenty of people out there indoctrinated in the darkest arts of commercialism just waiting for a chance to screw you over. Megacorps are happy to spend billions of dollars lobbying governments around the world to fulfill their agenda of global privatization. The only way to stop them, thanks to a nice fellow named Newton, is with an equal and opposite mass of organized capital protecting and defending the public domain and free culture. This is something The Internet Archive and other organizations like it understand in spades.
Speaking of which, the founder of The Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, once said, "access drives preservation." I've taken that on as a little motto of mine while sampling. You suggest that CC0 is somehow insufficient for an open exchange of material, yet its very definition, a proxy for the public domain, IS the definition of an open exchange of materials. There is literally NOTHING more open than CC0, so I do not get what you are upset about? Should I be RESTRICTING access to
my work from the nasty commercial applications? Because that's not what the public domain is... that's called ownership, and that's an intrinsic part of a capitalist society.
With the public domain, you don't get to call the shots, because there aren't even any balls in play. You own and control nothing- instead, we all own and control everything within it- patents, copyrights, letters, names, stories, pitches, letters. Indeed, legally, the CC0 samples aren't even mine now, and there is no way I can "get them back" even if I wanted to. The public domain is our heritage as a human race- everything from Plato to Bach, from the wheel to the internal combustion engine. To suggest access to it should be restricted based on non-commercial/commercial use is no better than the arguments put forward by the copyright-savvy among us, who seek the exact same thing (no commercial access to works), but using the argument that they should be paid for their work.
Despite being an 'artist' educated within a system that is fiercely pro-copyright (e.g. PRO's such as ASCAP, BMI), I am staunchly pro-public domain. To be clear, I believe copyright is just
broken (thanks, Disney), and to fix it, it should should, like a patent, have a short period of exclusivity (5-15 years) followed by entrance into the public domain (again, compromise: I must work within the system for a while or else it will be abused by those who have no conniption screwing me over). If this was how the world worked, I very much doubt there would even be a need for a 'copyleft' or 'free culture'. Instead, I have intentionally 'jumped over' this chain and immediately put this work into the public domain. It hasn't had new fuel in it for 95 years except what some very generous people have slipped into it in the same way I have, and it needs people who are willing to feed it so it can grow and once again be a useful, topical source of information and culture.
Unfortunately, going back to the quote from Brewster, most people want to be paid for me using their access to something (instruments, players, spaces) in order to make sample libraries, be it people selling unusual instruments on ebay or players who also live in the city and must afford the high price of living as a result. While there have been some people who have gone out of their way to help for no charge, it is almost always a bi-directional relationship.
Unlike code, art, or music, samples require money to create. It is physically impossible to create a sample without a space, without a mic, without an interface, without a musician (or an instrument), without electricity, without experience, without cables. While I am what most would call "cheap" (I used only free/public spaces, budget gear, and student musicians who were willing to work within my budget), it still came up to a sum that could have equaled a car. Almost universally, the better each of these factors are, the better the sample is. If I invested more time/energy/money, it WOULD be better and it WOULD be used more. If I invested less, it WOULD be worse and it WOULD be used less. These are facts which cannot be debated or circumvented in the process of development, and to be completely honest, they haunt me every day of my life. Every project in retrospect seems a million regrets, a million lost opportunities. If only I had just a little more time, could pay for just a little better musicians, could buy a little better mic.
So, if I can use what little wealth I have to make the help I can give others more potent, what is wrong with that? If I can afford to hire a group of good string players to come in for a few hours and perform samples, and then I can make those samples public domain, that helps you and me and everyone else on this little blue marble. However, if I lived a financially meager life by refusing all opportunities to make money over a goal merely of 'survival', I would not be able to do that, and I would not be able to help you or anyone else remotely as much as I can now. Instead I would have to rely on other people doing exactly what I do now anyway, defeating my own point of being meager anyway! Regardless, the number of people who do what I do (sample things then make the samples openly accessible) is very small, if you ever take a moment to read through the credits of freeware libraries. Probably no more than 50-100 people out there who have done it with any regularity.
I literally gave up the "holy first milestone of capitalist adulthood", owning a car, so that tens or hundreds of thousands of people around the world would have better tools to write music with. I gave up the luxury of living in a cheap little town in the middle of nowhere so I could have access to the largest concentration of student musicians in the country. VSCO 2 Pro has again waved that opportunity in front of my face, but I used every last cent that didn't go towards staying alive to get better equipment, to sample more instruments, and to afford the easily $100+/mo costs of keeping all that freeware hosted online alone. It is a distinct possibility I will not own a car in my life.
So, although I respect your tenacity of mindset, I cannot join you in your mission. My purpose is to use my position in society to the advantage of as many as possible. I probably have as many qualms with society as a whole as you do, but I refuse to use those qualms as an excuse to insult others over it any more. I am above all thankful to those who sacrifice their status, wealth, or time for the betterment of humanity, our planet, and our descendants, for in my eyes, that is the greatest mark and aspiration of a human being in our civilization.
Regardless, it may be the case in 50 or 100 years when our replication technology has advanced sufficiently that the concepts of currency and value fade into obscurity, replaced by the concept of personal ability. Regardless, we do not live in that idealistic time. What you expect of yourself is not realistic for the rest of humanity and treating people poorly because of it isn't going to make anyone's day or situation better.
I have respectfully considered your opinion and shared my own in return. I'm not here to argue, just to try to see eye to eye. I have already spent too much time here, but I believe someone will find this interesting or perhaps even useful. I will not post in this thread again, but if this has given enough fuel for a discussion to take place that can go somewhere for someone, then all the better.